As your gut spills over your belt and feelings of despair about the coming year become as frequent as the final demand notices, you may think Christmas is a time best forgotten. That turkeys shouldn't even be contemplated for another 12 months. Normally this would be the place to shoehorn in a link to EastEnders, if someone hadn't gone and made it good all of a sudden.

Traditionally, the biggest problem for the people who make EastEnders is trying to squeeze credibility out of characters they are unlikely to have encountered, never mind understood. Their solution over the years has been to churn out characters so far removed from reality that no one has encountered them at all. This means all dramatic conflict dribbles from ridiculous vendettas and infidelity, as the "Umm, so what is it that the lower classes do? Fight and fuck?" conversations echo all the way from the script room on to our television screens.

But recent weeks have shown a dramatic change. Someone has sussed that cock-er-neys sometimes smile at each other, have friends, and also possess those intricate emotions that can't simply be resolved with an arm wrestle. (This past month, arm wrestles were employed only to determine the finer details of tenancy agreements.) Out of nowhere, neighbours nod to each other. Husbands speak to wives. In return, wives speak to husbands and refrain from walloping them with frying pans, backing a few vodkas and finding a flake of joy in the loins of some passing idiot, while maintaining the cold expression and emotional repertoire of a dead trout.

New producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins has done what the average EastEnders viewer has fantasised about for years, and razed Walford to the ground with giddy slash/burn abandon. The remains of the phonebook-sized file with "shit EastEnders plans to piss the nation off" gouged on to the cover is being swept up along with the debris of destitute storylines and the stragglers who don't have a plot to piss in. Joey, AJ and Kirsty have been expelled, with all the ceremony you'd reserve for slinging a broken fridge into a neighbour's skip. Ronnie whisked Roxy and little Midwich Mitchell – sometimes known as Amy – to Ibiza before Roxy could realise Ronnie was behind Carl's untimely disappearance. And most magical of all, the tiresome fool who refers to himself as Alfie Hashtag Superhero was removed from the Vic.

All of this left a vacuum of power at the pub. Janine had hoped to get her mucky paws on it, but had a cashflow problem. That problem was David, with his foot planted firmly on her cash pipe, clicking his fingers for a payoff with one hand, dangling Janine's murder confession in front of her with the other. Faced with incarceration or losing the jewel of feudal Walford, she plumped for option C: running David over.

Janine was led away to have her Christmas dinner in Walford nick. Which made way for the new Vic overlords, and perhaps the most heralded arrival in Walford since last time pond-side bird scarer Mama Mitchell made her creaking return. Led, of course, by Danny fucking Dyer (or as Walford residents insist on calling him, Mick Carter), a gift from the soapy heavens, the Carter family also includes Linda (whose believability starts and, some might say, ends with having a forehead that actually moves), sister Tina (lesbian, with good line in gay puns), Johnny (so disturbed by Tina's gay puns he goes against nature and kisses girls), and the true beacon of hope for EastEnders future, daughter Nancy (even in this new age of enlightenment, every 10th character must bear the name of a Victorian match seller). They are tethered by DNA to aunt Shirley, who not only deserves a secure roof over her head, but has almost become a real person, one with an emotional capacity greater than 70cl, save for the occasional 8am public spewing.

So far only Tina – continually clothed in the fallout from a dirty bomb in a Primark returns bin – seems like she could do with some attention from the giant BBC scissors of unemployment, but there might be hidden facets yet. Particularly after the episode in which she bedded Billy, which had a working title of "sexuality is a spectrum, especially after a skinful". Compared to the others who've found themselves gazing beyond Billy's red puffing face at the ceiling, Tina is a catch. Billy thinks he can turn her. Billy doesn't know how lucky he is that Tina didn't use him to pick her teeth after she had him for breakfast.

Watching EastEnders at the moment feels like being released from a 20-stretch in grimy soap jail. EastEnders will never stop being stupid, but maybe it can stop being insulting and stupid, give female characters more to play with than "daubed marionette", and the male characters something beyond "scowl-shag-punch-pint". Don't bother too much with the youngsters at all, and please for the love of all things good forget that Shoreditch is round the corner.

It was much more sedate over on Coronation Street, where the most unsavoury festive happenings involved a mawkish singsong in the Rovers.

The saccharine atmosphere is probably down to Hayley's rapidly approaching death, evident by the way the make-up department maximises her wrung out flannel look with each visit from a Macmillan nurse and their huge sack of morphine. Hopefully there'll be some left over for Roy, who is in dear need of a nice mellow buzz. He is the real victim in this; after all, Hayley doesn't have to deal with Fiz and Tyrone shuffling in every day hoping to get a final glimpse of the poor cow – by now the face of Rimmel's cold porridge range. Roy finds it such an ordeal I've seen him go cross-eyed and delirious as he tries to make sense of the pair of bleating bread rolls in wigs hovering in front of him.

Roy and Hayley's troubles are a welcome respite from the real Corrie horror at the moment; Peter Barlow's Tina thirst. The human embodiment of regret has been frantically gulping down his orange juice, eyes fixed on the Rovers bar for months. Tina was unimpressed, in a breathless, impassioned way. So much so, she had to tear at Peter's clothes in disgusted fury and spell out expletives in his mouth with her tongue.

It isn't difficult to work out what Peter sees in molten and oozing Tina. What Tina sees is Peter - an alloy of withered, fag-scented flesh and self-satisfaction poured into a battered Easter Island mould – is a bit trickier to unravel, but I suspect the key is hidden somewhere in Bad Dads, Lads and Dickhead Cads: A Bumper Book of Freudian Analysis.

Peter focused so hard on his beautiful, glossy, purring babysitter he forgot he has a beautiful, glossy, purring wife in Carla. In fact the only thing that separates the pair is about a decade of dirty dog experience, something that Peter tried to put right in approximately 6 minutes of vigour so potent that not a single one of Tina's slinky tendrils was displaced.

In Emmerdale, Declan had the best Christmas in the country, getting slaughtered on chocolate liqueurs and burning his house down.

Sadface alert: Megan was trapped in the house at the time. The official line is that she was looking for a sunken and unhinged Declan, but anyone who witnessed the cloying Christmas hit lounge singer in her hotel can see that the flames of Habitat hell were a more appealing choice.

Since then, Megan has been kicking back in intensive care, while Declan and Charity have busied themselves framing Sam for the whole thing. Charity in particular has sunk her teeth into the fun, convincing Rachel she should confess to arson and do a runner with talk so slick you barely even notice her pirouetting round the phrase 'ulterior bastard-child-shaped motive'.